Antipodes: The Other Side of the World

There is an informal and anecdotal belief among Americans that if you dig a
hole deep enough, eventually you would come out in China. This is
theoretically possible if the hole is angled in the right way, but if you dig
straight down and through the exact center of the earth from anywhere in the
48 contiguous United States, you'd come out in the Indian Ocean. Only in
parts of Argentina or Chile would a straight hole emerge in China.

The map on this page allows you to approximately locate the place directly
on the other side of the world from anywhere. The complementary red and black
outlines are reversed, so that a place in the right place on the black outline
map is directly opposite the place on the red outlines. The red outline map
is "upside down", with south at the top, so it may be a little confusing to
locate places on it.

For example, you can look in the Indian Ocean area of the black outline
map, and you can see there the USA in red, upside down between the black
outlines of Africa and Australia. If your geography is adequate, you can tell
that the furthest away place from New York in the world is a spot a few
hundred miles southwest of Perth, Australia, off in the Ocean.

The map does not show small islands well, and several tiny, remote,
windblown French posessions in the southern Indian Ocean are not visible.
These uninhabited islands are the only land antipodal to land in the
contiguous 48 United States: A slice of far northern Montana is directly
opposite the Kerguelen Islands, while St. Paul and Amsterdam Islands are
opposite southeastern Colorado. Outside the "Lower 48", far northern Alaksa
is opposite coastal East Antarctica, and Hawaii is antipodal to the Kalahari
Desert in northern Botswana.

The following is a list of very approximate pairs of antipodal cities.
Since about 80% of the world's land is antipodal to ocean, this list is
necessarily very short. Since the paired cities below are as far apart as
possible, they are probably the most expensive pairs of cities when it comes
to flying or telephoning between them.